Volume 47, Number 20 · December 21, 2000
Genius in Private
By Charles Rosen
How, in the eighteenth century, the director of church music in a small, unimportant German town attained posthumously a prestige that has no superior in all of Western musical composition and only one or two equals is the strange story of Johann Sebastian Bach. Every other composer to reach enduring fame either worked for at least a significant part of his career in a musical center of international importance or traveled to a great capital city to make a public presentation of his works—Palestrina in Rome; Handel in London; Haydn in Vienna and London; Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms in Vienna; Mendelssohn in Berlin; Wagner in Munich and Paris; Berlioz, Chopin, Debussy, and Stravinsky in Paris. But Bach never traveled except very briefly, and the city of Leipzig, where he worked from 1723 until his death in 1750, had neither a prince nor a bishop, and consequently neither an opera house nor the patronage of a court.
Feature, 2599 words
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